Who Wins the AI Payments War?

Transcript

I I think really since Chai GPT exploded on the scene a couple years ago, uh people have been trying to marry crypto and AI and talk about how they go together. Uh the the the synergies, etc. But it looks like it's finally happening. Uh we are uh Coinbase made a lot of waves I think last year uh November during one of their product demo days and I don't even think this was one of the big products that they were launching but with their X42 uh payment standard for gem to commerce uh Tempo just went live with the mainet with its own machine to mean machine to machine uh payments protocol and everyone is talking about a commerce and and bots transacting with each other um at the best of humans for all sorts of

of of reasons and uh and use cases. So, I'd like to just kind of throw it to you kind of open-ended, Lorren. I mean, what are what are you seeing in terms of of aentic commerce? Like, what are your expectations for for how this sector can grow? And perhaps most importantly, uh with many different offerings now out there, what do you think is going to sort of delineate or demarcate the winners from the losers? >> Great question. I would say that something very important to note here is that if agentic commerce is is going to let's say re revolutionize the way we're we're doing things is that they need

robust pricing and proper pricing mechanisms because some of these agents they they operate operate at their own peril and if they if they start doing transactions that are worth a dollar at at three cents, you're going to lose a lot of money or you're going to make a lot of money regardless of which which uh counterparty you are. And in terms of how the market can grow, it's it's I think it it goes hand inhand with how stable coins are growing and how they are being used in terms of um onchain capabilities and it's a trillion dollar market. There's multiple researches also done by McKenzie. I believe there's probably more out there. Um, we've seen um Coinbase's

X42 processing uh $34 million in volume. Uh, Google is launching a payments protocol. So, everyone's trying to jump on the hype train and it's going to be very interesting to see how that converges alongside stable coins because in 2025, we saw 33 trillion in in stable coin volume. that was all done by humans or probably mostly done by humans. So, it's very interesting to see how that is or very interesting to um observe how that's going to grow as we see more agentic payments launch and how that's going to slot into Tradfi as well as

crypto as well as just e-commerce in general. Yeah, it's one of the things that I like I'm trying to to track and I would imagine you you might be as well is really figuring out how to um get a real sense of activity like upticks in activity when it comes to these types of bots because like if you create some basic bot on Claude or or or Chad GPT or or whoever I'm I'm not a coder so I'm not really um able to go too deep into this you might create uh like I I'll make a task for something I'm doing at Sharplink and it'll create 10 different bots for me doing 10 different things simultaneously

and then once it's done it goes away we'll look at something like like network addresses like that's a that's a common uh metric that we try to use to to understand actual usage of of a blockchain like Ethereum Salana Bitcoin whatever um I could see like an exponential increase in new wallets new new addresses. Um, but they're not persistent and they they don't go on forever. And and when it comes to to stable coins too, like you can make it far, you could say, well, these new types of blockchains with micro payments through stable coins, a lot more payment volume, but the value may like unless there's going to be new use cases that were not

priorly um viable before Agent Commerce, like you may not necessarily see a huge surge in in volume. Uh what are you like how do you think about this problem? um like what are some of the the numbers or or metrics that you think will be really helpful in sort of getting a sense of of true adoption of a commerce? I would say looking at looking at unique addresses, looking at how these transactions are conducted, where they're going. Is it just like spam be conducted to inflate numbers? Right? I saw a paper saying recently that um the volumes on on um well the the unique addresses on USDT

are a lot different compared to those on on USDC. So that's all metrics we're looking at uh via blockchain monitoring um a solution we built to to look on chain but what I would also look at is how can we use these agents to actually like you mentioned do something that previously wasn't possible right do we really need these agents right now is it actually useful for us to use them because I I might just do it myself uh I I might just order whatever I want to order myself. If we're talking about trading, that becomes a a whole other thing, right? Because you can start

automating your system, can start automating strategies, you can um do a lot more things on chain, especially the way blockchain interoper is interoperable with AI. So that opens two different pathways in the sense that from a let's say a retail perspective is it useful for me to put an agent on this does that agent need to do transactions for me and on the other hand you would have to let's say from a trader perspective how can I automate this strategy how can I make sure that agent isn't going to make any mistakes for me and how can I make my life easier and and more let's I put it on autopilot from a from from

that point of view. >> Yeah. Because the last thing you'd ever want is one of your agents like accidentally revealing a private key or or or uh I I I was reading some things about like at some point the Nigerian print scam is going to come for AI agents and and some some benevolent agent is going to want to say, "Here, I'll help. here. Here's $500,000 of of USDC and uh and and and what do you do